Zuckerberg accused of using FB user data as bargaining chip to help friends, Facebook denies

Zuckerberg accused of using FB user data as bargaining chip to help friends, Facebook denies

4,000 leaked documents show that privacy wasn’t a major concern for Facebook and that the company was focused on maintaining its dominant position in the market.

Shweta Ganjoo

New Delhi

April 17, 2019

UPDATED: April 18, 2019 09:33 IST

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HIGHLIGHTS

Facebook used its user data to help its friends.

Facebook considered selling its user data to developers.

Facebook considered restricting user data access to apps it considered rivals.

In the days following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a number of investigative reports have detailed have Facebook, in the years leading to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, prioritised growth over data privacy. And now a new report show how the social media giant leveraged its user data to help its friends and fight competitors and rival apps.

According to a detailed report by NBC, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg oversaw plans to use user data as a bargaining chip as a leverage against the companies it partnered with. The report, which is based on nearly 4,000 pages of leaked internal documents and communication spanning between 2011 and 2015, also shows how Facebook under the watchful eyes of the company's top executives including Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg used its troves of user data to prevent the growth of companies it viewed as a competition.

Some of these documents have been previously reported by the British parliamentarians investigating the company's biggest privacy scandal. They stem from a court case filed by a tech startup Six4Three, the firm behind the Pikinis app, which sued Facebook in 2015 after the company announced its plans of cutting down access to certain type of user data and they include among other things emails exchanged between Facebook executives, meeting summaries, webchats and presentation.

As per the report, Facebook came with several plans to make app developers and partners compensate for the user data and insights that the company provided them. This included direct payments, data-sharing arrangements and advertisement deals. Ultimately Facebook decided not to sell its user data. However, the company reportedly gave away the information to developers who were considered friend of the Facebook founder and COO Sheryl Sandberg or who spend money on advertising on Facebook or shared their own user data with the company.

The report also notes that the social media giant restricted the user data access to an app called MessageMe because the app was gaining popularity and could pose as a threat to the Facebook Messenger.

Facebook, however, has denied giving preferential treatment to some developers owing to their spending on the company's platform or relations with the company's executives. "The set of documents, by design, tells only one side of the story and omits important context. We still stand by the platform changes we made in 2014/2015 to prevent people from sharing their friends' information with developers like the creators of Pikinis," Facebook's VP and deputy general counsel Paul Grewal said in a statement to the publication.